


The Theory of Flesh and Bone

by Euregatto



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mild Gore, Team Bonding, Team as Family, Visions in dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-27
Updated: 2019-05-27
Packaged: 2020-03-05 16:46:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18832651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euregatto/pseuds/Euregatto
Summary: It was difficult to describe Corvus’ face, when he grinned like that—but Yabbat was reminded only of a memory of her mother, close enough to be a scent:It was nothing more than an animal, my child, and it was afraid of you too.





	The Theory of Flesh and Bone

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted an excuse to write Yabbat and Corvus from a different perspective (thus the story alternates between their third-person viewpoints). Mainly, I wanted to explore Yabbat coming to think of the Black Order as her new family, and Corvus, coming to think of her as the Order's newest sister; thus, I worked with some of the major themes presented over the last issues that the Order appeared in: family dynamics, platonic affection, and the multiple uses of the word love.
> 
> This is just one of those indulgence pieces, doesn't really fit anywhere canonically (I guess at least after No Surrender since I didn't write in Supergiant, rippy dippy my ghost girl), and takes a few creative liberties with the portrayal of powers, abilities, etc.
> 
> [Also, despite a _small_ blunder,](https://officialtrashbin.tumblr.com/post/184855565353/totally-fucked-myself-over-while-moving-documents) I managed to finish this.
> 
> I hope you enjoy it all the same!

    

   

   

The day before he died, Corvus awoke with the belief that his arm had been severed while he dreamt, only to realize that Proxima’s head claimed it. A servant of his gestures, he stared at the ceiling and let her sleep, while thinking about  _poetry_ , for some unholy reason, the work of  _D’Raevis_ , as uttered by his brother once while they reclined in the afterglow of a mission that left Corvus with a borehole in his chest and the Maw a fractured rib—yet it was only  _poetry_  Dwarf could coherently filter through his mind at that moment, and it was the final stanza which latched itself stubbornly to the back of Corvus’ brain:

 _Here they spoke in whispers, no louder than painting,_  
_brushed a streak. Went over it and went_  
_over it and went over it, then_  
_unsurprisingly, became wounded by the color._

The poem, he remembered suddenly, was called  _Envy of Time_ , and he thought it particularly underwhelming.

  

  

 

  

*

  

  

  

 

When he awoke again shortly after, the dreams had been unkind to him. He laid still for a while, motivation stalled by exhaustion; his fingers were furling and unfurling against the corner of the bed, testing the resolution of his nerves and every thread of muscle they pulsed through—then came to realize it was Proxima who encouraged him from sleep, her hand still on his face. She uttered again, “My love, wake up,” but the way she spoke to him, it sounded like something that had been said before by someone else, somewhere else in another life. For a moment, he looked up at her as if she were a stranger in his sheets—at the sharp edges of her unfamiliarly familiar face.

“Corvus—” Her palm hit him a little more firmly, jostling him into focus. “Hey, come back to me.”

He blinked once, sucked in a ragged breath and took in the scent of her nearness. “Am I still dreaming?” he uttered, and went over it and went over it and went over it _,_ yet his mind continued to falter, to scrounge up the fragments of a nightmare he was already forgetting.

“Not unless I am, too.”

“Ah, then—” He hesitated. “Have we overslept?”

There was no oversleeping anymore. Not really. Only the days when they were sent out and when they weren’t, more and more and more often lately a byproduct of the Grandmaster’s tumult of spontaneous desire, to fill the boredom of longer and longer and longer years. The missions had evolved to reflect these games, something that maintained their statuses as cold and calculated machinery, living pieces on a chessboard—pawn to e4, remove the factor of the queen’s men, gut the nobility, decorate the throne room with their insides. Reset the board. Conquer. Reset the board. Destroy. Reset the board. Reset the.  _Reset_ —and in return, the Grandmaster received a few minutes of appeasement.

(He tried not to think of Thanos anymore.)

Proxima slid her hand up his thigh, rested it on his hipbone and felt the flutter of his pulse. “Is that such a bad thing?” she asked, then gravitated to his lips. She could taste herself on him from the night before.

When they parted, he still looked a little lost. “I suppose it isn’t,” he said absently, his mind backtracking to the—the  _feeling_  he couldn’t quite describe, which lingered in the wake of his sleep like a malicious apparition. It was as if something was out of place in the universe, the jowls of destiny slipping shut around his ribcage, suffocating him with deliberate ease. He thought he had seen its intent in his dreams, but that would imply he held the mingled visions to the pedestal of fact.

“Corvus?”

“Yes, my love?”

“Come with me,” she said, motioning for him to get up.

He raised his brow at her. “Don’t I always?”

She had opened her mouth to fire back a rebuttal, but quickly retracted it, instead telling him, “We cannot remain in bed all day—”

“Why not?” he offered up, claiming her wrists in his hands, and rolling them both over so he was rested between her legs. He never restrained her against her explicit wishes; instead he carefully slipped one arm under her back and pressed their bodies together.

She ran her finger curiously over the blade shard in his temple. Oh, how easily it could slice her skin if she moved too subtly. “It pains me to inform you of your responsibilities to the Order, my dear husband.”

Corvus slid his palm along the camber of her side, reacquainting himself with her as the only one who’s earned the right; he felt the tremor of her heart, how it tapped curiously against the cage of her chest, testing its resilience. “Then a few minutes, perhaps,” he said, kissing a path across her jaw and to the plane of her neck.

Proxima huffed, but he could hear the smile in her voice when she told him, “I would not have married you if you were worth less than mere  _minutes_.”

Like an agreement, they claimed the rest of the morning for themselves.

  

  

 

  

*

 

  

  

  

“There is something I need to ask of you.”

This, Corvus Glaive decided, was how he was going to give this conversation its inertia: skip the greetings, the formalities, present the severity of the situation through rigid body language and— _do not beat around the bush_ , was the phrase the Ebony Maw would use. Corvus was willing to abide by these little stipulations if it brought swifter answers.

The Maw looked up from the artifact that had secured his focus for the last three days and sneered.  “Have I not told you I’m preoccupied? The information this Acruvian Sphere could provide—”

“I had a strange dream. I—I require your  _skill_.”

In the brilliant reflection of the orb on his desk, the Maw’s expression softened. Or, at the very least, he was no longer leery about the interruption. He swerved in his chair to face Corvus, who still stood in the threshold of the doorway, and pressed the tips of his fingers together; another chair from across the laboratory slid forward, adhering to the unnatural power that enveloped it. When it came to a rest parallel to him, the Maw motioned for Corvus to sit.

The general did, then rested his glaive between his knees and leaned on it as if he would collapse any moment. The Maw ritualistically crossed one leg over the other. They were both silent for a long while; Corvus gazed at the swell of blood that emerged from the deep gorge in his palm, and then slowly, his eyes shifted onto the shards of glass scattered unceremoniously across the floor to his far left. When he blinked, the wound was gone, but the glass remained—perhaps an inconsequential item thrown in a fit of frenzy; the Maw was malicious but not often quick to anger. It gave Corvus an impression of just how exasperating that sphere had been and would continue to be.

“You are aware I’m unable to psychoanalyze silence?” the Maw said. “If you hesitate to speak, I cannot help.”

 _Help_  was a unique word selection. It was difficult to ask someone advice, to say,  _I’m experiencing visions of deaths that are not my own._  Corvus would have sought Dwarf’s council by the technicality of default, if the dreams hadn't been indicative of a past that haunted them both, and he hadn’t yet wanted to worry Proxima, so he begrudgingly turned to the Ebony Maw. He sought not  _help_  but perhaps a moment of inflection, words from a mind that was not his own to make sense of the obscurity of it.

“I saw the universe. I am seated—” Corvus gathered himself up, miming his dream. “I am in a throne made of bodies—species from all our conquered worlds. And…” He looked at Maw, then through him.

The Maw frowned. “Your words are difficult to follow.”

Corvus replicated the motions of his sleep—staring intently at his palms, at the unmarked skin. “My species were superstitious creatures. Dreams were an infrequent occurrence, and as atypical as they are in nature, we came to believe in them as premonitions.”

“Ah, so I’m in the presence of a clairvoyant.”

Corvus snapped his eyes up to see the faintest smirk on the Maw’s face. It was always whiplash, to remember that the Ebony Maw had a vague sense of humor beneath the scowl lines etched into his features—and, Corvus realized that up close, it was easy to see the deep depressions in his colleague’s face. How the exhaustion took hold. He wanted to ask about it, but that level of disquisition between them was so far outside the deviation of their established companionship that Corvus couldn’t find the words and simply let the moment pass.

“You’ve yet to make your request,” the Maw said suddenly.

“Are you able to erase them from my mind?”

“I cannot erase overactive imagination.”

Corvus pressed his hands together. “The memories, then.”

The Maw’s eyebrow arched, indicative of his peaked curiosity. “Memories?” he echoed, entwining his fingers, the subtly of his motion one Corvus had come to learn as reflecting deep intellect.

“I do not believe in superstitions,” the general said, “so these dreams—I believe that are merely  _reflections_ , the subconscious bevy of a past I have thoroughly repressed. We must avoid personal distractions for the time being; the Grandmaster has us playing games we cannot afford to lose.”

The Maw frowned, as if contemplating it, or as if considering whether he should bring up whether marriage constituted as  _personal distraction_. After a moment he dismissively wafted his hand and swiveled back around to face the orb. “I cannot help you.”

“Yes, you can.”

“No, Corvus Glaive, I can _not_.” The Maw ran his fingertips over the intricate details in the sphere, which ignited saffron-gold, but other than that, it did not respond to his touch. He seemed absorbed by its mystery, by the age of it. “That is something that cannot be undone. I’ve learned to reconstruct the thought processes of other organic entities, yes, but I’ve yet to— _test_ , my capabilities with the restoration of the mind. I will not be held accountable for destroying the mental coherency of our leader because you have no control over your own arrogant tenacity.”

Corvus growled with displeasure, but the Maw was right. He spent years at a time perfecting each aspect of his abilities, weaponizing it—he had only once before attempted to tear the knowledge from an amnesiac’s mind by violating their personal memories, but it had left a connection that returned the pain, that amplified it even as he grit his teeth and scoured deeper. Corvus wanted to believe the Maw could try again, and  _succeed_ , but, no, that simply wasn’t realistic.

Instead he said, “Hm, so you  _do_  recognize my authority.”

“Leave,” the Maw snapped. He was rigid now, indicating his disinterest in pursuing the topic.

Corvus stood, and told him honestly, “I will not trouble you with this issue again.”

“Agreed.”

As Corvus strode from the room, the door slid shut behind him; the inner lock bolted into place, just, not of its own accord.

Frustrated, he set his path for the training hall.

    

   

 

   

*

 

  

   

   

“Corvus,” was the first word out of Yabbat’s mouth, and he glimpsed over at her reflexively. A woman constantly in need of stimulation, if she wasn’t reading or tinkering, she occupied the cylindrical training room to kill downtime and swung her fists at the suspended training bags Grandmaster presented as her personalized reward for successful missions. They all received little incentives. To bait their interests, keep them working no matter how frequently they told him,  _I fold_.

“Yes, Yabbat?”

“You have excellent timing. I’ve been meaning to ask—” She tightened the strap on her thigh until it almost hurt and relished in the violence of it. A nervous twitch, of sorts, Corvus thought. “A few days ago, you did this move—a throw, with your legs. Made that Avad-Viis asshole eat dirt. Is that a secret technique?”

“You want to learn it,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Yes—if you do not mind.” She added that last part as if she had overstepped her bounds and sought to remedy it before it angered him. It had been years since they first met, yet the Swan swerved through conversations with him like she was some virus in the body of its host. A foreign entity that didn’t quite belong there.

Corvus hadn’t crossed this way to see her, particularly, instead hoping he could slink through the shortcut to the next hall—but it was a comfort to know she was willing to distract him for a while.

“You have never sparred with me before,” he told her pointedly.

She didn’t miss how his fingers curled around the neck of his glaive, suffocating it. “But I have seen them,” she answered back, “your methods—and fought by your side many times. We are far from strangers.”

 _Yet you address me like we are._ Instead he said to her, “Then you understand I am not an easy opponent, even without my weapon.”

“I would certainly hope not.”

Corvus went to the wall and set his glaive against it. He claimed her attention, rolled his shoulders. “You are aware of my skill,” he said, searching her expression for a waiver that would convince him to backdown. “I could seriously injure you if you fail to keep pace.”

“I’m not a little girl, Corvus.”

“Then at the very least,” he told her reassuringly, “I will refrain from killing you. Proxima and Dwarf very much enjoy your company.”

Yabbat swept one foot behind the other and raised her fists to guard her face. She had studied him when she could—wanted to  _learn_ , perhaps too valiant in her efforts. When Corvus fought, he was all precision and speed, the meticulous techniques of a hunter through and through; his hands never made fists, they were always the same open-palmed assumption, reinforced claws bent at an angle that could flay skin from muscle. A lifetime of slit throats had rubbed the polish from them, but Yabbat knew better than to assume he was any less lethal without the armor—the extra layer kept his bloodlust in  _check,_ kept him apart from the warm, velvet feel of it. If she hadn’t spent the last months in his vicinity, she would be entirely surprised by his maneuvers, by the predatory glint on his jagged teeth in the floodlight.

He dashed across the room, a blur of gray on black on black, far too straightforward but she anticipated him and parried his strike. Unlike him, Yabbat’s aptitude came from looking like she cared a lot less than she did, like she was above exerting herself in the fight when she wasn’t. But in execution, each of her swings was an admission of her need to  _hit_ , each hit a desperation of the want to belong to something again. Now her fist took Corvus in the jaw and she felt something crack under the force of her knuckles. He spit blood, set his teeth again and took her split hesitation to get close, throwing his elbow into her stomach and smashing the absolute shit out of it.

She had taken blows before but the sheer strength in Corvus’ slam made her believe for a full second that he had punctured her torso through. Her muscles screamed in defiance. She attempted to lunge but he slid under her guard, scissored his legs and sent her crashing to the floor. Yabbat used the propulsion to roll easily up to her feet, but she was entirely winded, and quickly found herself crouched, sucking in deep breaths.

“That throw?” he said, his grin somehow made much more terrifying by the rivulet of blood that slid between his teeth and dripped off his chin. “The enemy will look at your hands for weapons and claws, at your torso for soft spots and openings. They will never suspect your feet.” He offered out a pointed hand. “Come, try again.”

Yabbat shot herself at him. He must have suspected her sucker punch because he leaned back along the path of her swing, grabbed her wrist, and rolled to the floor, sinking his heel into her stomach, and slinging her like a ragdoll over him. She landed awkwardly and cried out. Corvus immediately leapt to his feet, never missing a beat. Yabbat was an immediate second behind him, energy flaring from her fists, no longer restrained in their brawl. She was not losing control. In fact, she was merely ramping the stakes, playing his game—and went for him again.  

Whatever maneuver she anticipated then, was wrong. Corvus caught her swing, felt an acute _snap_ in his wrist—then, finally, in the same fluid move he made a fist with his other hand and punched her square in the throat. Yabbat buckled the instant the strike met its mark. She hadn’t been able to predict it. It was uncharacteristic of him to—hell, he’d made a  _fist_ , and she’d never been hit  _there_  before, so she didn’t process the motion until well after the pain ran hot and intense through every crevice of her system, causing her to lock up on her side.

Corvus gazed down as Yabbat gasped for air, hands grasping uselessly at her spasming throat. He looked at his palm. At the blood that swelled in the divots made by his claws. Wounded by the color.

“You lack guard,” he said, thoughtlessly adjusting his vambrace as if it had been misplaced. “Your capabilities are unparalleled, dear Yabbat, but power is more than offensive presence. If I had not retracted my claws, you would be dead. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

Yabbat was recovering quickly, as she always did and always had to. Within a minute she was on her knees, and the minute after saw her stand, still clutching her throat where he had struck her. “You have a strange way of teaching,” she said through grit teeth.

 _“You_  were the one who asked to learn the throw.”

“My point stands.” She threaded her fingers through her hair and exhaled. “I can’t tell if I should be grateful you didn’t stick your claws in my neck. Perhaps that means something.”

“It means I won’t always be here.”

There was something beneath his words, as if they were a mirage, and if she flipped them over, she would find the truth in his intent. “Corvus,” she tried, the verbal equivalent of dipping a hand into the water to test its temperature, but he knew what she was going to ask.

“Everything is fine, Yabbat. I merely prepare for all future outcomes, regardless of their chances.” He flexed his hand. It throbbed where the metacarpal bones had broken but amended themselves quite dutifully. “You must improve your guard if I am to teach you the throw. To be a hunter—”

 _“You_  are the hunter, Corvus. I am a Black Swan.”

“It matters not. Listen to me,” he told her firmly. “To be a hunter, I learned when to initiate, and when to defend. As I understand, you have learned to strike before the enemy can even consider your presence. Perhaps that is the fault of a wolf.”

Yabbat pressed her lips into a thin line, and then she added, “I can make a shield.”

“You should know well by now that matters little,” he said. “Now, again; this time be mindful of your guard. Watch for openings.”

She nodded and raised her hands. Eager, at least. She’d been told all her life to sit down, elbows off the table, stop wandering off, take this seriously; her vocal curiosity had been muted by her bloodline but was forever set inside her mouth, coded by a glitch in the systematic creation of genetic assembly, where it was pressed into energy and expelled from her fists, her eyes, her legs. It became an unrestrained violence. Biting down on her cut lip, asking Corvus— _why, what, how_. (She thinks he reminds her a lot of her brother.)

Corvus let her come at him; she swung wide and went low, assailing him with questions without ever opening her mouth— _how would you defend against this, can you parry a roundhouse kick, show me where you lean into it, step back, center point, tell me, Dreadlord, I want to know everything_. Each parry, counterblow, and snarl he gave was an answer he took in stride, glancing away her blows, pacing himself, ensuring her curiosity was sedated until, finally, he located an opening.

He never once used his feet but her sight waivered to them frequently, her posture rigid with anticipation for the takedown, so he gave it to her—swept out her legs right from underneath her, took her wrist and met her on the floor, legs clamped over her sternum, her arm woven through his knees and secured against his chest in a perfected joint lock.

“This isn’t what I asked to learn,” she gritted out.

Corvus’ tone felt unreliable when he replied, “You need to learn.”

Yabbat tried to conjure up the memory of the last time she had been met this fiercely—the many faces in the palace, the height of them above her or the color of their clothes, the self-approved expression in her teacher’s face when she was thrown to the floor in the sparring room for the third or fourth or fourteenth time, things that, back then, she was far too young to realize were important. _You need to learn,_ her brother had told her to justify the bruises, the broken scaphoid. _You cannot allow the wolf to hunt you again._

A sultry voice said to them from the across the room, “Poor Yabbat. If you looked any more dejected, I would almost believe you were sulking.”

“I do  _not_  sulk,” the Swan replied sharply. Either way, Corvus released her and she sat up to meet the gaze of their onlooker.

Proxima, spear forever at her side, swaggered across the chamber and breached Corvus’ personal space to slide her hand along his shoulder when he stood to meet her. “Of course you don’t. Did my husband best you in combat?”

Corvus scoffed. “You’ll find she’s responsible for the break in my wrist.”

“And the fracture to your jaw,” Yabbat said and leaned forward, one hand under her chin. Corvus looked at her pensively. She was catching her breath, bent low to the floor where a splatter of blood stained the rutted tier. “I asked Corvus to teach me a technique, but I didn’t realize he was  _this_  well-versed in combat.”

“I was a general of the Mad Titan,” Corvus said plainly. He returned his glaive to his hand and added, “Though I suppose if that mattered beyond striking fear into the hearts of anyone but our own, we would not be here.”

Whether he meant alive or on in the service of Grandmaster or both, the Swan couldn’t tell, and she didn’t dare read his mind to find out. Proxima must have known though. She touched his shoulder and offered him a rare smile. Yabbat realized she should probably commit this to memory, too.

Then, their communicators crackled.

 _“We have a slight problem,”_  Dwarf said into his intercom, but there something about his tone, laced with the same knowing intent that Corvus spoke with.  _“I intercepted some encoded plans. Looks like the Acruvi are mobilizing for war against the Avad-Viis.”_

“So soon?” Proxima asked into her wrist.

_“It appears so. Grandmaster wants us to pick a side and make it count. What are your orders, Brother?”_

“How much did you gather?” Corvus asked.

_“Perhaps not enough. The Avad-Viis want to control the capital city and plan to move their forces in at dawn before the Acruvian war party makes it there. However, I suspect my intercepting this transmission wasn’t by coincidence.”_

Corvus mulled over it—the Acruvi wanted the Order’s heads for stealing artifacts, history and technology after massacring a sub-station of almost 1,000 soldiers, but the Avad-Viis wanted similar trophies as remittance for stalling their plans to overthrow the monarchy and grapple the reins. After a moment he pushed the communicator in his collar to his mouth and said, “Then we will most certainly walk into a trap.”

_“Could be the Acruvi, could be the Avad-Viis. It’s difficult to decipher whether this transmission was encoded between traitors or baiters.”_

“Only way to find out,” Yabbat said. She was clenching and unclenching her fists in apprehension.

“We get nothing from this game,” Proxima told Corvus, narrowing her gaze. “We should let them duke it out and take what we want in the meantime. The political nature of their species matters little.”

 _“If I might,”_ Maw said into the channel.  _“We are in a position of observation, that much is true—and Proxima is correct: we far too often these days fall into our proprietor’s schemes. However, Acruvis rests between two jumps to major trading ports, and is thus overlooked by the common traveler. Should we make an ally of the Avad-Viis, we could not only take what technology we desire, but we would also be in possession of subordinates with enough inclination to serve as a diminutive base of operation. Hidden, as it were, in plain sight.”_

Corvus replied, “I am glad I haven’t yet taken your head, Maw.”

_“How kind.”_

“We will see what awaits us in the capital,” Corvus told his team. “Perhaps a bloodbath?”

“Shall I kill a few in your name, my love?” Proxima asked, and her husband’s mouth twisted up. It was difficult to describe Corvus’ face, when he grinned like that—but Yabbat was reminded only of a memory of her mother, close enough to be a scent:

_It was nothing more than an animal, my child, and it was afraid of you too._

_*_

Corvus died that morning in the capital city.

The Order landed their shuttle in the outskirts of Balora, the once illustrious capital city of Acruvis, which was now a minefield of crumbling platforms, untriggered explosives, and bodies from both sides abandoned in the wake of the civil war. The Black Order was accustomed to the sight of fatal conflict. Still, they moved cautiously through the necropolis, Corvus a full pace ahead—he was homed in, training his ears to the deceptively muted landscape. The group descended the ridge formed by a collapsed overpass, down to the center of the city, where the streets swung around a previously splendid courtyard that occupied enough space to hold an armada. Now its greenery was blasted from the earth, vehicles tipped on their sides, armaments bent, and hundreds of carcass bites strewn across the pavement.

“Pleasant,” the Maw grumbled, glaring down at a severed arm that bore the charred armband of the Avad-Viis Uprising. “It appears the occupation squad was obliterated on sight.”

“War party must have been bigger than they thought,” Dwarf said observantly.

“Something is wrong,” Proxima remarked. “Look. The Avad-Viis soldiers have all been flipped on their faces—I assume they did not all perish this way, or at least, not coincidentally.”

Corvus saw a black metal peering out from under one of the Avad-Viis bodies; he toed its side, flipping the corpse onto its back—and there, strapped to its chest, was a remote detonation device painted with Acruvian slang, “eat shit”. It occurred to him that there were devices attached to the face-down cadavers in the courtyard, and Proxima had been as on point as her spear.

It occurred to him he was about to die.

Then the explosion went off.

  

 

  

  

*

 

  

  

  

He was perched on a throne of bodies, then felt it shift dangerously beneath him—the miasma of war suspended itself in the air, he couldn’t breathe it in—he was wetted down with blood, saw it swell from the wounds in his hands—a voice spoke, heavy-willed, called his name and wanted him to look. But he was compelled by a terrified instinct to gaze solely at his hands, that the knowledge of what presided beyond the edges of his palms would bind him to it, it wanted him to look, it would  _kill_  him if he looked.

It  _wanted_  him to—so he  _looked_ —

—and when he awoke it was with a start. He hissed as pain rendered in his chest, cried out, felt the heat amplify when he reflexively tried to move his body to escape an ache that followed. His breaths came in harsh, gurgling intakes, his ruptured lung filled violently with blood as he attempted to expel it at the same rate. His existence teetered on the edge of death as he resurrected, and was suspended there, tormenting him. He was drowning in his own skin but his glaive was tethering him to life; he could feel the cold heat of it, all its ancient fury, steadily stitching his soul back into his body. There was no way to describe that feeling. The weight of returning to existence from the brink, a place of almost-peace, almost-gone. The agony of it.

A shadow eclipsed his vision, silhouetted against a backdrop of smudged light. Familiar hands grasped his face. Anchored him, whispered,  _“Corvus.”_

Blood welled up in the back of his throat and he choked trying to say her name. Proxima shushed him, though it did little to quell the pain. Hands that were not hers grabbed hold of the shrapnel that speared through his body, impaled him upon the ground and—it abruptly shifted, enough to tear open wounds that were in the process of knitting around it. He wanted to protest the pain and instead suffocated. His body seized. The familiar blackness of death crept into his vision.

“My love, stay with me.”

“I’m going to tear it out,” he heard Dwarf say. “Keep him still.”

Corvus remembered everything the moment the shrapnel ripped outwards and freed him from the brink. The ignited explosive. The moment of incandescent fire before it all cut out, the smothering of flame—he gasped, felt the weapon work more furiously at his wounds, and then rolled onto his side and vomited. Rejected blood spewed across the ashen ground, burnt rock, details of fallen rubble and debris. A hand on his back. Lips to his ear. After it all, Corvus felt—

“Better.”

“Then I would suggest getting yourself together,” the Maw grit out.

The environment came into focus, enough that Corvus could see the desecrated cityscape. Proxima and Dwarf were unharmed, the Maw bled from a gash in his face, below his left eye, and Yabbat pulled herself to her feet, panting from the exertion of her energy; it seemed that she had only barely been able to put up a barrier around her vicinity, allowing her to deflect most of the initial damage away from the others.

“You were right about the trap,” she said.

Corvus sucked in air. The pain was subsiding, leaving in its wake only the intense, brutal heat of being renewed by his glaive’s essence; if he had been born anyone else, perhaps he would have been allowed to keep the scar. "What is it to be right about something,” he said, “if that means everything else goes terribly wrong?”

“Enemies inbound,” Dwarf told them.

In the distance of the battlefield, Acruvi forces surged into the fallen city. They were fierce, lithe beings with claws and a bone to pick with everyone, astride burly beasts with jagged horns curved forward; it was a shame they had only been united in the front of extinction, and the Grandmaster had expressed his disappointment in their rejection of political assimilation with the Avad-Viis.

The team moved in synch. Dwarf hefted his cleaver onto his shoulder, Midnight swung her staff into her right hand, Yabbat and Maw tightened the circle. “Have a plan, perhaps?” the Maw asked Corvus, his hands igniting with a ghostly energy. “Preferably it is something more coherent than simply slaughtering them all.”

Corvus called his glaive to his hand and used it as a crutch. The process of standing hadn’t been this difficult since he was an infant, but Yabbat gave him her shoulder and the intense ache in his torso was lifted just enough to keep him from collapsing back to the ground. He surveyed the area with a quick sweep of his eyes, pinpointed every weakened structure and potential play—

He realized his hand was still on Yabbat’s shoulder, and she was  _learning_ ; not his plans, not his thoughts, but instead the dream. She saw his hands bleed. She saw him look up—at a woman who resembled Dwarf, and it dawned on her that no, Dwarf resembled  _her_. And then she heard the words from a voice she dared not recognize—

_This is how you look at the ones who love you._

He snapped his arm away so suddenly she flinched. (And she had learned from the Swans that someone only flinches when they’ve been caught off guard.)

Corvus shook his head. “Let them come to us,” he said without missing his cue, swinging his glaive into his other hand. “Yabbat, do you see that building?” He gestured with the tip of his blade to a skyscraper several blocks away that sagged dangerously to one side. The trajectory of its collapse would place it directly upon the path the army was currently surging through.

“Say the word.”

“When that structure comes down,” Corvus told his team, “they will attempt to flank us. Form a ring, keep them in front, and do what we do best. Black Swan, if you would be so kind?”

Yabbat braced her neck and fired the condensed optic energy into the failing support of the building, sending it careening onto its side upon the advancing army. The tremor of the impact jolted the ground beneath their feet, and the expelled accumulation of debris and dirt billowed through the surrounding streets in one large cloud.

Tendrils of dust crept through the courtyard. Corvus clutched at his laceration as the skin knitted closed; he had just enough time to heal, and felt the tremblor of the approaching army, advancing on all sides, riding, as he suspected, around the collision site to flank the Order from all fronts.

The Acruvi forces came into view. They lunged through the streets, formation all desynched, entirely indicative of a species that hadn’t been at war in hundreds of years. Incompetency at its finest. Corvus counted hundreds of heads in each party that converged upon them, thousands—no weapon consistency, no practiced assault, only cheap tricks and paunchy, armored mounts.

Crovus raised his glaive and led the Order into battle.

  

  

  

 

*

  

  

  

 

After it was over, Corvus perched in a throne of corpses, glaive leaned against the inside of his shoulder, his claws slotted together in thought—he seemed to relive the past time and time and time again, piling kills, absorbing the sight of a bloodied world from an ascended viewpoint. The first massacre, his home world. The last massacre, when whatever malevolent force that propelled the universe ever forward finally let him rest in the cold dirt. He gazed down at his palms. Unwounded.

8,841 fresh corpses filled the courtyard around him. “Disappointing,” Dwarf said, striking his cleaver through the back of a writhing Acruvian. 8,842. “I was hoping they would have sent more. Have the tales of our amorality evaded this cluster?”

“They underestimated us, Brother,” Corvus replied. “Perhaps this dent in the Acruvi forces will lead the Avad-Viis to the denouement of their conquest.”

Proxima strode to her husband and gazed up at him, her expression entirely unreadable. He recognized, at the very least, that she was contemplating something insightful. “My love,” she cooed, gesturing out to him. “Come, let us slaughter the unfortunate survivors of this pathetic battalion.”

Corvus leapt from his perch and went to his wife. Her palm pressed to his face; he nuzzled her hand, felt the flitter of her pulse beneath the surface of tepid skin and how it jumped, delightfully. A soldier was writhing in pain behind where Proxima stood, and they brought their blades down into the Acruvian’s skull, slicing through bone as if it were comprised of cheap, frangible material. Then they titled into each other, drawn magnetically by violence, love, longing—the collision of desire, and how it assumed different forms for the same esoteric reasons.

Underneath the inevitable, this was all they were.

  

  

  

 

*

  

  

  

  

Corvus awoke the night after he died, and the dreams had been kind in their absence—he felt Proxima shift beside him as if disturbed by his own stirring, and in the deep throws of her sleep she reached for his hand and grasped it. She mumbled incoherently, her long tresses of azure hair fanned out over the pillow; he regarded her existence for a while, her expression voided of its forbearance and that battle-hardened glint in her limpid eyes, the kind of impression that had to be earned, not given.

But it occurred to him that he was parched. He slid out from under the covers with small, volitional movements and dressed, realizing then that he wouldn’t sleep for the remainder of the night. Then he slunk from the room without waking her, his attention focused on water to quell his thirst.

In the threshold of the mess hall, the Ebony Maw appeared with an unpeeled fruit in his hand, the deep depressions in his face amplified by the shadows in the corridor, and the sheen of his irises set aglow by the scintillating lights lining the floors.

"Maw," Corvus said.

"Dreams, again?" the Maw assumed, feigning disinterest, though Corvus knew the sentiment of asking at all was the telekinetic’s indication of concern.

"No," the glaive-bearer replied. "None at all."

After a moment, the Maw nodded; his body was debilitated by not having enough of anything he required—nutriment, rest, hydration—though he wouldn’t properly remedy this until he had the secrets of the Acruvian Orb out. “Rest well,” he said, and exited the hall. At the curve of the passage he went around Yabbat, bid her a good night, and slipped into the shadows of the ship.

The Black Swan gave Corvus an acknowledging tilt of her head, then went to him and remarked, “Sleep evaded me, as well.”

“I slept better than most nights,” he replied, surfeited by the mere mention of it. “I merely desire to quench my sudden thirst.”

“Tea?”

Corvus lifted his shoulders. “All right.”

They didn’t speak as she prepared them drinks from pressed fallow spice leaves from the Hydrixis Supercluster market, filled the cups with steaming water and then finally made her way over to him at the center table. Corvus drank slowly, as if the very weight of his glass required an exertion he couldn’t afford if he hoped to remain awake, and Yabbat felt no need to tell him about the wonders food had on energy—he was always impractical with his health, a concomitant of being immortal, it seemed—so she said nothing as she silently watched him from across the table. There had once been a time, when the Swans found her shortly after the execution of her family, that masticating food reminded her of being in some other animal’s jaws and caused her to retch it all back up. It took days to develop an appetite. It took weeks for food to cease tasting like blood.

She grasped her cup with both hands, as if the heat wasn’t about to brand her palms. “Can you tell me about the dream?”

The silence audibly cracked under the force of her words.

He had his eyes on the ripples in the drink. “It Is not a dream, Yabbat. It is merely a memory.”

“I should not have seen it, regardless. I did not mean to—look, that is, into your head, I wished to know—” She set her jaw. “I should not have done that.”

Corvus made a noncommittal sound in his throat. “It matters little. However…” He lowered his shoulders, which Yabbat recognized by extension as the lowering of his guard. “If you are so inclined by your curiosity, I will answer your question.”

She focused on him, opened her mind and listened.

“When Dwarf and I were children,” he started to say, so solemnly that Yabbat propped herself up to look at him more intensely. Her eyes were a comfort in his proximity, something translucent and cool, akin to thin ice—“we were brought by our mother to the coming-of-age festival. Every year, when the moon makes— _made_ , its revolution, our village’s huntsmasters traveled deep into the hinterlands and brought back a live Abolu—do you know what this is,  _Abolu_ _?”_

“Similar to elk, I guess?”

“No; they are large beasts. Hairy. Mean. Extinct now.”  _Like the rest of the planet._  “The huntsmasters tied it with hard wire bonds to stakes in the ground and called the children to the slaughter. Those who had the heart to partake were the ones who were ready to transgress into adulthood.”

Yabbat swung one leg over the other, indicating the absoluteness in her attention as she absorbed his words.

Corvus droned on. “The festival was in full momentum around the sacrifice while it bellowed out for the herd that would never come. Music, arts, lanterns, literature. The sonance of sounds drowned out the pitiful beast’s wails. I remember how…I stood by the center clearing, watching it thrash, the morbid fascination having long ago earned my attention better than the celebration could ever hope to. All the while the huntsmasters prayed to old gods to bless the feast. Then, when the night reached its crescendo, the children were gathered the front of the crowd, and the huntsmasters presented us ornate daggers.”

“Did you partake?” Yabbat asked.

“I…refused the blade. I told the huntsmasters that the daggers were too small to do much through such thick fur, and I requested one of the huntsmasters’ glaives. I beheaded the beast myself. Our mother, she was beaming with pride—she swept her arm around me, gestured to the crowd and said, _Remember this moment forever, my son. This is how you look at the ones who love you."_ He seemed stuck on the memory, looping the scene in the back of his mind until all the color was worn from it. "I'd like to imagine I knew what she meant."

They went quiet. Drank tea.

“What happened to her, your mother?” she asked.

He glimpsed her once over—Yabbat, a Black Swan, who treated the idea of battle at the Order’s side as a sacramental rite, and listened to him with a fervid concentration—and he wondered if she would understand the damage that had to be done to lose something on  _purpose_.

“I suspect Dwarf feels some degree of guilt,” he replied thinly, not quite answering the question.

“And you?”

“It is simple, Yabbat—and listen well, for I will only tell you once.” He didn’t break eye contact as he said, “We make our choices, we live with them, reset the playing board and repeat.”

There was nothing simple about any of that; too much variation, room for error, the never-knowing. Corvus continued to maintain visual contact and though his expression was stoic, she finally understood that his eyes no longer asked,  _Why are you here?_ Yabbat realized that had never been the case at all. Instead they had been telling her of her acceptance:  _You are here,_ and there was an understated fondness to it. She had seen it in his mother’s eyes. She had seen how he looked at the people who loved him.

“Then  _why_?” she asked.

Corvus’ shoulders lifted again, a typically subtle movement subdued by exhaustion; his guard refused to allow him another moment of cognition, as if the only method of survival he had left was to stop thinking about it entirely. His expression didn’t change, though. Yabbat suspected that if it had, it wouldn’t be by his own accord—like one plane falling out of existence and into another, how it just slipped free. To be honest, she didn’t know what kind of reaction she wanted. It had been easier to understand him when they threw punches instead of words.

“I apologize,” he muttered. “I am tired. Perhaps I will tell you some other time.”

“You should rest.”

“And what will you do?”

She braced her hands around her cup. It felt impossibly cold. “I…will be here. Always.”

There was no undoing those words. Yabbat decided she would never  _want_  to—through the battles, the violence, the agony, that would be her testament to her family, a bond strong as steel, strong as blood. This was how she would look at the ones who loved her: something she had, for better or for worse, come to understand and embraced as her own.

This was all there was now, and it was everything.

  

  

  


End file.
